motion blur + area light = black

[thobry]

area lights are cool, but can be problematic.

What you can do is on the area light in the attribute editor... where you have Use Ray Trace Shadows checked... below that adjust these two settings higher until you get a cleaner result. This dirty shadow artifact occurs even when moblur is off. Area lights lack the light radius attr so by default they are already casting softer ray traced shadows which need to be cleaned up. I would opt for using a spot light, in fact I only use spot lights to light in 3d. more control less problems.

good settings for your area light shadows are:
Shadow Rays: 4
Ray Depth Limit: 5

good luck.

[stephen2002]

Thanks for the response. There is nothing on the front and back of the little car that would be casting shadow at all. I had done it through with a depth-mapped spot light and ended up with the same problem only it was much less pronoucned.

I really like the area lights, how shadows get fuzzier the farther they are away from the object. It can be faked with depth-mapped spots but it never looks quite as good.

[thobry]

DMap shadows are great but yes; you cant get the softness falloff as acurate as you can with raytraced shadows.

Renderman is way better at depthmap shadows. I cant even begin to tell you how great they are.

I have found mental ray is really good and fast at calculating raytraced shadows with light radius (softness) cranked up a bit.

maya renderer is really like a lame horse.
oh well.
glad i could help.

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